


The Devil's Grasp

by EnderFlash



Series: Berumin explorers AU [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 20:46:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29320371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EnderFlash/pseuds/EnderFlash
Summary: Newspapers often lauded that this golden age of technology had brought mankind closer to the gods. Bertholdt thought that it might’ve been the opposite—it made the gods more recognizable to man.While flying over the uninhabited wilds of the Farlands, located beyond the corners of the known world, Bertholdt and Armin come across a landmark. They take it in, have lunch, and talk.
Relationships: Armin Arlert & Bertolt Hoover, Armin Arlert/Bertolt Hoover
Series: Berumin explorers AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2153715
Comments: 5
Kudos: 15





	The Devil's Grasp

**Author's Note:**

> I have no clue how technology works, and I've never eaten suet pudding in my life.

“Would you like lunch, Armin?”

Armin made an unintelligible noise. The steel-plated engine was covered with his maps and notes and books, and he hunched over it, scribbling something onto what looked like a topographic drawing of the eastern Farlands. 

Bertholdt pushed himself away from the control panel and sighed, but it was lost to the droning rumble of their airship. Between them, Armin was the better cartographer and navigator, so Bertholdt normally let him plan their journeys, but he’d been pouring over his notes since the crack of dawn. Bertholdt had managed to get some lukewarm tea and half of a biscuit into him for breakfast, and it wasn’t uncommon for Armin to sink hours into a single inquiry, but now it was getting concerning. He got out of the pilot’s seat and walked to where Armin was standing, crossing the dim cabin in a few long strides, to put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Armin, you’ve been at this all day. Come on, there’s still a bit of the plum-duff left. We have to eat it before it goes bad.”

As he’d hoped, mentioning pudding got Armin to perk up. Bertholdt took the chance to peek at what he’d been working on so fervently, glancing over near-overlapping rows of cursive and pencilled circles all over the map of the region. It was likely their itinerary, but there were more locations marked than Bertholdt expected.

“Oh gods,” Armin suddenly said, staring at his watch. He straightened up so quickly that he nearly hit Bertholdt, but at the last second he swerved his head out of the way—straight into the floating bookshelf, knocking a precariously balanced encyclopedia over the edge.

Before his mind could even register if it was falling onto Armin, Bertholdt’s hands snapped out and snatched the book from the air. It was a dusty and heavy compendium on edible Glycian plants, more than capable of breaking skin with those hardcover corners, none of which made Bertholdt want to return it to its risky fit on the shelf. He placed it on the engine, instead, with Armin’s other books. “Are you alright?” 

“Ah, yes, sorry about that,” Armin stammered, rubbing the back of his head. A few papers and notebooks had been knocked to the floor in his panic, and he hurried to pick them up. When he did, he banged his head against the oversized engine, making Bertholdt wince at the sound. “Damn it!” Armin groaned. This time, he stayed where he was, kneeling in that narrow strip of floor between the engine and the cabin wall, while clutching his forehead in agony. 

Bertholdt bent down, half-concerned and half-amused, to offer Armin his hand. “Here,” he said, trying to keep the warmth out of his tone and failing, “let’s try again, but slower.”

Armin peered up at him peevishly, trying to look more upset and similarly failing. “You could at least try to be more concerned,” he pouted, though he took the hand. His gloves were rough, even to Bertholdt’s calloused touch. “It’s not my fault this place is so small!” 

Bertholdt couldn’t help it. He snorted. Without saying anything, he knocked against the cabin’s wooden ceiling, which was only an inch higher than his head. Then, even as Armin’s face began to redden, he elbowed the wall, which hardly required him to move his arm, and raised an eyebrow at the much, much shorter man. 

“Okay, okay,” Armin muttered, giving him a half-hearted swat. His eyebrows were drawn together in an imitation of irritation, but a small smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. “I get it, no need to rub it in… When’d you get so mean?”

Bertholdt’s heart skipped a beat in fear, and for a split second he meant to apologize, but then he recognized Armin’s genuine amusement and let himself smile a little, sheepishly. “Maybe I’ve been hanging around Reiner too much. Or Eren.” 

Armin made a sound that was somewhere between a squawk and a groan. “Don’t even say that!” When Bertholdt just shrugged, barely suppressing a wider grin, Armin huffed. He began to nudge Bertholdt towards the cabin’s exit, shaking his head furiously. “Nevermind that, let’s just go eat. I have to get back to work afterwards.”

“H-hold on! Let me make sure the ship’s stable,” Bertholdt protested, and rushed to the controls to do just that. He glanced out the front window while he was at it, and ended up taking a longer moment than he’d intended. 

“Bertl, do we have any molasses left?” Armin called, ripping Bertholdt from his reverie. The blond was dejectedly shaking an empty jar, its contents reduced to dark amber smears on the glass. When Bertholdt shook his head, Armin put it down very sadly. In that moment, Bertholdt dearly wished that he’d brought another jar of syrup onto the ship. The more rational part of him knew that it would’ve been a silly violation of weight limits, but, as he knew well, little of anything that had to do with Armin was rational. Bertholdt looked back out the window. After all, they had come out here, hadn’t they?

Armin pushed open the door, and a gust of wind blew through the room, sweeping out the stale cabin air. Bertholdt could feel the cold from the pilot’s seat, and he was grabbing their coats and scarves just as Armin turned around to ask him for them. The blond thanked him with a nod when Bertholdt handed him the extra layers, and after throwing them on, the two of them stepped out onto the veranda. 

They were greeted with another blast of wind, and Bertholdt braced himself, squeezing his eyes shut as they teared. When it settled, he took a deep breath. The air was crisp and thin, nothing like the filtered hallways of luxury airships, but there was something about it that he liked. It felt like a warning, and that made it real.

He opened his eyes. The wooden walkway of the airship went out for another few feet, and then beyond the copper railing, there was the world. A vast expanse of green stretched out below, far beyond what the frame of a window could contain; indeed, it could be said that for the great forests below, a rustling ocean of foliage touched only by the shadows of clouds as tremendous as itself, the view from a cabin was like a mere photograph, capable of being limited by man. In truth the hills rolled as far as the eye could see, the trees gradually giving way to dancing grass plains, the silhouettes of distant mountains the only implication of their natural end.

From these trees jutted towering, twisted pillars of stone, dark like obsidian. They were ugly, beautiful things, erupting from the leaves and curling towards some unseen heaven. From the ground, they could have been seen as an incomprehensible monument of nature. But from the sky, seeing it in its near-entirety, it was like—

“The Devil’s Grasp,” Armin whispered from his side. Bertholdt felt something pressed against his hand, and he turned to see that Armin had already unwrapped two biscuits for them. He took it with thanks, and bit into it a lot less thankfully. He leaned against the railing, and a few crumbs fell down, down, and Bertholdt wondered what impact would look like. “Of course, that’s what the first Caelluch expeditions called it,” Armin continued, “but I think they were too harsh on it, just because they hadn’t seen anything else like it before. I have a theory, that is, I just think that beyond the Iron Mountains, there’d actually be a lot of rock formations just like this one. In fact, I’d wager that the ones up north are even taller than these.”

Bertholdt, listening intently, hummed. “I don’t know, it does look kind of like fingers reaching up. The way it curls like that.” Then, hastily, he added, “But you’re right, it’s still a harsh name.”

“No, no, you’re also right,” Armin assured, flustered. “I see it.”

“And I think you’re right, uh, about these rocks being less unique than some newspapers make them out to be,” Bertholdt continued. “I’m no geologist, but Reiner tells me about them sometimes, and he says the same things as you.”

Armin perked up, nodding furiously, and waited a moment to swallow. With his cheeks full of biscuit he looked like an overeager chipmunk, though Bertholdt would never say that out loud. “Oh, I didn’t know that! When we get back, I’ll have to talk to him! Yes, I think that most people, that is, people in the community, accept that these kinds of things aren’t an anomaly, but of course no one’s been able to confirm it.” After saying those last words, he sobered a bit. 

Bertholdt looked around him and suppressed a shudder. The skies were clear here, and he was no novice pilot, but there was a reason no had crossed the Iron Mountains alive. “Right, the storms. I’ve never met any of the people who tried. We were mostly in different fields, but…” He trailed off, because both of them knew about the attempts. They’d studied them extensively.

“... Yeah.” Armin looked contemplative. He stared at the jagged rocks, a faraway look in his eyes. “You know, for me, there were always too many pillars to look like a hand. There’s at least a dozen, and some of them look more like lumps than fingers.”

“What does it look like to you, then?”

“I’ve heard some myths portray it as a ribcage.”

“A ribcage?” Bertholdt squinted at the rocks again. He supposed that the curvature fit.

“Yes. I’ve always liked the thought. The fossilized remains of some colossal warrior, who fell in combat, back when the gods walked the earth.” Armin spoke wistfully, and then gave a nervous laugh. “I guess it’s a silly story.”

“No,” Bertholdt said, letting himself press against the railing a bit more. “No, I don’t think it is.” 

Armin looked startled, like he was used to others laughing with him on that. “R-really?”

“Really. Not any sillier than some hand clawing out of hell. I think I like the thought, too.” And then he did really think about it. “I wonder what it’d be like, being that big. You’d be pretty slow, wouldn’t you?”

“Well,” Armin began, clearly delighted at Bertholdt’s interest, “I’ve thought about that, and I’d agree, but the oral stories don’t tell us much about how these beings worked—whether they followed our known laws of physics, for example. Speed is relative, so I doubt they would’ve thought of themselves, or others, as slow. That being said, they likely didn’t have much frame of reference, since they rarely came across each other. They say that when gods clashed, the tremors formed ravines, and the dirt they kicked up settled into mountains. The swords of the fallen were swallowed by the earth, over the ages, and they became the veins we mine for copper and gold. And the lakes, too, they say were created by these gods—carved out by their stomping, and then filled with the tears of their beloveds.” 

“And the ocean?” Bertholdt asked.

Armin smiled. “No, not the ocean. The oceans were always there, alongside the earth itself.” 

Bertholdt hummed again. “It’s… it’s a strange thought. But I think it’s interesting. I wonder what it’d have been like, to see things from so high up.” He wasn’t scared of heights—couldn’t be, with his profession—but the idea of a god, stepping over the plains and reshaping the landscape with its whims, staring down at the insignificant world below, made him shudder. He wasn’t sure if it was from fear or reverence. 

Armin’s laugh surprised him. “We don’t have to wonder, Bertl! We’re seeing it right now!” 

Huh, Bertholdt thought, because Armin was right. The trees and hills looked so small. On foot they could’ve wandered through that forest for weeks, and meant nothing at all to those ancient woods, but somehow it was from above that the world looked truly overwhelming. Something about being able to see so much of it at once. 

Bertholdt had never considered himself a religious man. Not even a superstitious one. He kept his head down and buried in his books and machines, and though he enjoyed a good fiction, he never understood how people could see them as reality. Since travelling with Armin, though, things had changed. Seeing the great wonders of nature, so often incomprehensible to humans, moved his heart in ways he couldn’t completely comprehend, either, and made him consider that there may very well be forces and beings beyond their normal reality. The awe he felt towards a natural wonder—was it so different than the awe churchgoers felt towards a sign of the divine? Were they not all recognitions of things greater than human industry, which inspired humans to rationalize them through stories and laws, through religion and science? 

He didn’t think he could ever go to church. Still, he was no longer a boy who believed that his world could be categorically explained, nor was he content to accept it for what it is. With Armin there was uncertainty, a constant pushing of the horizons. And as he looked down at the trees, he wondered if that colossal warrior had understood the world any better than them. 

He wondered if that colossal warrior had thought the land more beautiful and sacred, not less, with its perspective. He wondered what it’d been like for it, to die here. 

Newspapers often lauded that this golden age of technology had brought mankind closer to the gods. Bertholdt thought that it might’ve been the opposite—it made the gods more recognizable to man. 

Armin’s grunts pulled his attention away from the view. At his side, Armin was hunched over the pudding tin, trying to open it without much success. Bertholdt watched him for a few more seconds, and then, feeling bad that he’d watched at all, offered to do it for him. A red-faced Armin acquiesced, and Bertholdt hooked his finger under the tab and pulled it open. There was a sweet scent. 

Armin’s clear anticipation made Bertholdt hurry to pull out the spoons from his waistcoat pockets. With only one free hand and his rush, he fumbled one and it fell onto the walkway, then bounced right off the ship. The two of them stared at where it had gone overboard, and then at each other.

“I’m sorry!” Bertholdt exclaimed, feeling his face heat up in mortification. 

“N-no, it’s fine! We still have a spoon,” Armin frantically said, waving his hands. “You can have it.”

Bertholdt, still embarrassed at his display, argued back. “I’m the one who dropped the other one, and you like this stuff a lot more than me.” 

“It’s okay! I can eat with my hands!!” Armin raised his hands to emphasize his point, and both of them looked at his lead-smudged fingers, unprotected by his fingerless gloves. He promptly lowered them. “Er, that is…”

Before Armin could raise another protest, Bertholdt shoved the pudding and spoon into his open hands. “Armin, really, it’s not a big deal. Just take it before I drop the other one off the airship, too.”

“Well,” Armin said, and Bertholdt prepared himself for another argument, “we can just share!”

Bertholdt thought about it for a moment. “That was the obvious solution, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Armin agreed, sheepishly, and he started laughing. It was infectious, and Bertholdt couldn’t help but join in at the silly banality of it all. Armin dug a spoon into the gummy plum-duff, and then, while raising his arm, paused. Armin looked at him with an expression Bertholdt couldn’t decipher. He held the spoon strangely, like he was trying to reach out and feed it to the birds, rather than shovel it into his own mouth. 

“Er, Armin? Are you alright?” The blond was reddening again, even though nothing had happened. 

“Oh, yes! Of course!” Armin exclaimed. “I think it might be easier if I just… eat half of it first… is that okay?”

“Like I said, Armin, it’s not a big deal. Seriously.” Bertholdt rubbed the back of his neck, running out of arguments to make, but luckily Armin didn’t continue. While he ate, Bertholdt caught an eyeful of his pencil-smudged fingers again. “And what were you working on earlier? I mean, I’m really grateful that you’re planning things out, but I thought you’d finished everything before we set out.”

“Yes, I did,” Armin said, licking a crumb off the spoon. “But we moved faster than I’d expected, and we’ve still got two weeks until supplies run out. So I figured that we could travel a little further north than originally planned.”

Bertholdt recalled the map they’d drawn out their journey on. “So skirting around the Glycian borders until we get to the Iron Mountain range?”

“Not that far in one go, no, but we should be able to get to Northern Glycian territory with the supplies we’ve got. We can restock at Lichium. Have you ever been there?”

“Once,” Bertholdt admitted. “It was just a layover stop, so I don’t remember much, but I remember the route. The type of people on luxury airships don’t usually have much reason to go to Lichium, or Northern Glycia as a whole, really.”

“Sometimes I forget that you used to do that kind of thing. Not that it was, uh, bad or anything,” Armin laughed nervously, not meeting Bertholdt’s eyes. “I’m just surprised, still, that you decided to come with me. This doesn’t pay much, and it’s a lot riskier.”

It’d be even riskier for you if I wasn’t here, Bertholdt thought. He shrugged. “I wanted a change of pace, I guess.”

“You didn’t like your old job?”

“Well… I wouldn’t say that. It paid well, which I needed, and it… it wasn’t stressful, which is why I decided to do it.”

Armin nodded. Bertholdt had already told him about his dad’s frail health, and Armin never pushed him on the topic, for which he was grateful. Bertholdt continued. “And… I was just glad to be working in aviation at all. I never thought I’d make it to the skies.”

“What?” Armin gasped. “But you were third in our year, at the academy! Everyone thought you’d make it!”

“Oh, uh, really?” Bertholdt blushed and ducked his head. He hadn’t known that. “Well, I didn’t. So for a while I thought that I’d gotten really lucky, and that everything’d be okay.” 

“... But it wasn’t?”

“I wouldn’t call things bad,” Bertholdt clarified, and then fell silent, trying to figure out what to say. He’d never vocalized his feelings about his career, before, not even to Reiner or Annie. He never felt the need to, because things _hadn’t_ been bad. It was a slow, rote existence, and he had been comfortable with that. Even when he decided to join Armin, he’d never fully hated the years he spent flying recreational airships, because he wouldn’t have been able to pay for his father’s treatment without them. He wondered if he should leave things there, but then he looked into Armin’s open, patient face, and something tugged at his heart, something that wanted to be let out. “At worst it was… boring.”

Armin chuckled. “That, I can imagine.”

“Yeah,” Bertholdt said, smiling a little. “I was grateful, obviously, but the routes were simple and repetitive. I tended to work long trips, too, so at times the cockpit was stifling.”

“You weren’t allowed to take breaks?”

“I was, but there weren’t many places to go. The guests make noise in every room and hall, and the employee break rooms were… they were okay, but I never got along with any of my co-workers. It was mostly my fault, since I wasn’t very good at holding a conversation.”

“That’s their problem!” Armin exclaimed, surprising Bertholdt. “We’re holding a conversation right now, aren’t we?”

Bertholdt blinked. “I suppose… but…” Armin was an exception to a lot of things. “Maybe. Either way, I didn’t like to go out much. That, with the long hours, and… it was lonely.” 

And he had been. When he’d met up with Reiner and Annie in between trips, and they all shared stories about their jobs, all his memories came with that uncomfortable edge—though he’d never let the two of them know, of course. For him, it was long hours of staring out and down through the windows, in a small room. The skies came with invisible roads, and the landscapes became familiar. Flying had been… disappointing.

He was too ashamed to tell Armin, who was so patient and kind, that he’d been, at times, resentful. At the academy. At his co-workers. Even at his father, for forcing him to care about the paycheck so much, though that ugly thought had always been followed with hot, burning resentment towards himself. And indeed, during those years, he had resented himself the most. He’d wondered if it were the skies that had let him down, or himself. Looking at the view before him now, he thought that it was likely the latter. 

Bertholdt rested his elbows on the railing, the wind gentle against his cheeks. He took in the pillars of the Devil’s Grasp, and couldn’t help but think about how tall that colossal warrior must have been, again. “You said that this god would’ve been one of a few, right?”

“Huh?” Armin looked taken aback by the change in topic, but then gave a quick nod. “Uh, yeah.”

He propped his cheek against his hand. “Dying out here, slain and unburied… I wonder if its view had been lonely?” Just like mine, he left unsaid.

The two of them were silent for a long moment. Bertholdt didn’t expect Armin to respond, and felt a pang of guilt for ruining the mood. His palms turned sweaty and his mind scrambled for something lighthearted to say, but then there was something hard pressed against his arm. He looked down to see the tin containing the spoon and remaining plum-duff.

“Here, I’m done with my half,” Armin said, poking him with the tin again. “You can eat the rest.”

Mildly bemused, Bertholdt accepted it. He picked up the spoon and peered inside, and noticed that the pudding looked pretty broken-up. Tinned pudding usually resembled a brick. Then, as the suet pudding easily gave way beneath his spoon, he realized that the gummy exterior bits had been eaten already.

“When I was going through the process of buying the airship,” Armin began quietly, recapturing Bertholdt’s attention, “I often went to the club on Stevenson’s. To talk about my plans, and see if I could if I could get some advice from more experienced explorers. When they heard that I wanted to venture out because of some old stories, they laughed me off pretty quick. Traveling to lesser-documented regions is expensive, and nobody’d sponsor an expedition that couldn’t promise riches or political glory. Everyone advised me to reconsider.”

A tide of indignation rose within Bertholdt, and even though they were half a continent away from Caelum’s borders, he wanted nothing more than to storm back and give those club members a piece of his mind. He opened his mouth to say something, but Armin shook his head and continued talking. “I didn’t, though I thought about it. I knew my dreams were never practical, but… I didn’t expect reality to be so harsh.” Armin dryly chuckled. “The week after I got my airship, I did a test run from Sirene to Cottonfield. The fields were even prettier than they’d been in photographs, but I couldn’t help but remember what they’d told me the entire time. I thought that maybe I should just give up on the impractical parts, and limit myself to Caelum and Southern Glycia—maybe some Northern parts, if I had the time. 

“But then I ran into you at that bookstore. Somehow, I talked you into coming with me. I’ll admit, a part of me thought, wow, I can’t tell you all these tall tales and then just take you to Cottonfield!” Armin laughed again, somewhat nervously, but this time with heart. “And I don’t know if you noticed, but, er, the days leading up to our departure, I began to doubt things again.”

Bertholdt had definitely noticed. It didn’t take much to tell that something was off when Armin, who rarely drank, had invited him over for drinks and then proceeded to spend half the night tearily reading battered children’s adventure novels to him. “Really?” He said anyway.

“Yeah, I mean, this is a weeks-long journey to some uninhabited corner of the world. There’s a lot that could go wrong, and now I was dragging someone else into it all!” Armin’s words were rolling into a speedy mumble, and he gestured frantically as he spoke. “Honestly, I thought that maybe I should ask if you still wanted to do it, since I thought that you weren’t ever going to bring it up yourself.”

“But I want to be here,” Bertholdt protested. 

“I know. At the end of the day, I always knew that.” Armin turned to him with a radiant smile, and Bertholdt’s heart skipped a beat. “That kept me going. And now we’re the only humans for miles and miles. Crazy, huh?” 

“... Yeah.” Something soft and warm bloomed within Bertholdt’s chest, even as he pulled his coat tighter around him against the wind. He wasn’t sure what. 

“So, you know, I guess what I’m trying to say is,” Armin stumbled, blushing and running his hands over his face, “ I don’t really know what that warrior saw or what it thought. I mean, I don’t even know if the gods did emotions the way we do them. But out here, you’ve got my back, and I’ve got yours, right? Whatever you see, you won’t have to see it alone.”

Bertholdt wasn’t completely sure what to say—not for a lack of words, but because he was thinking of too many. Armin seemed to understand, because he shot Bertholdt a reassuring grin and turned back to scrutinizing the Devil’s Grasp, no doubt estimating how close they could get to it. Bertholdt followed his gaze. 

And he realized that already he was thinking of descending altitude, how his hands would guide the wheel, so that Armin could look over his shoulder and point to an interesting pattern or crevice, his hair brushing Bertholdt’s cheek and his voice a little too fast. He was thinking about the pilot’s seat, the sound of Armin’s frantic scribbling and paper shuffles a few feet behind his back, barely audible over the creaks and groans of the walls. Then his eyes fell to the base of a stone pillar, where it sunk into the forest, and he thought about walking through the undergrowth, lantern in one hand and compass in the other, Armin a few steps behind. 

It took him a moment to realize that he had been gripping the pudding tin hard enough to bend it, though that wasn’t very hard to do. Dutifully, he scooped up a large crumbly piece, and when he bit down the sweetness of chopped currants met his tongue. There was only a slight metallic taste. It was nice. The interior parts of pud had always tasted better. 

“Armin?”

Armin turned to look at him. His eyes were blue and bright, like the skies around them. 

“You’ve, uh, got pencil smudges all over you.” Bertholdt tapped his own cheek with the spoon, to point out where. “I think they’re from when you rubbed your face.”

“Oh.” The blond looked at his hands. His fingers had a little less black on them compared to before. For possibly the fifth time that day, Armin flushed, deeply, and then scrambled to wipe his cheeks clean, his palms instinctively flying up. “G-give me a moment!”

“Armin, you—!” Bertholdt’s hands flew to his pockets, and, trying not to drop their second spoon, he fished out a handkerchief and shoved it at Armin. “You’re using your hands again! You’re making it worse!” 

“Sh-shoot!” Armin snatched the handkerchief and tried again. “Ah, I mean, thank you, but I was using my palms, which are covered, so it was probably fine…?” 

“Still,” Bertholdt managed, “just keep that for now. You can give it back after we find somewhere to wash it.”

“Right, right.” Armin bowed his head, and as he wiped the last stains off his hands, he gained a contemplative look. “I think I remember passing over a river not too long ago… one of the older maps might have marked it. I’d have to check.” 

Bertholdt looked up from his snack in dismay. The sun was barely overhead. “Oh…” He wasn’t one for complaining, but his legs had only just started to lose their soreness. 

“We both should go back, actually.” Armin gave an apologetic shrug and tapped his watch. “There’s only so many hours in the day, and we still haven’t found a spot to stay the night. C’mon, Bertl, it’ll be fun!” He said it teasingly, but there was genuine enthusiasm radiating from every inch of him, from the grin on his face to his hand outstretched to Bertholdt.

Well. Bertholdt thought about the two of them hunched over a faded map, knees knocking against the engine and shoulders pressed against each other. “Alright,” he sighed with a resigned smile, taking Armin’s hand. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

**Author's Note:**

> -Yes, Armin thought about feeding Bertholdt in that moment.
> 
> -Writing characters and dynamics are fucking haaaard.
> 
> -This fic was a thought experiment about them being happy and living their dreams. In particular, I thought a lot about Bertholdt's last speech in 3x15, and tried to steer him in a different direction in this AU. Canon Bert got to see the extent of the cruel world, but he was never allowed to see its beauty. As a result, he eventually embraced nihilism, and found a sort of comfort in his helplessness. It was a tragic and compelling conclusion, but here, he's allowed to see what's beyond the horizon, so to speak, and so comes to view his own insignificance in much more positive context. 
> 
> -Armin, the poor boy, benefits greatly from having someone to give him a push. I didn't think much about where Eren'd be in this universe (this was a Berumin drabble first and foremost), but I don't think it's implausible that Eren wouldn't come with him. In canon Eren largely prized the ocean as a symbol of freedom, and was never as into the exploration aspect as much as Armin was. In a universe with no walls and Titans, would Eren will value exploration the same way? Or would his obsession with freedom bring him up against more sociopolitical problems? Mikasa would likely join Eren on his path. I might go more into them at some point.


End file.
